Imperious

The problem with Valery Gergiev.

Gergiev thrives on a hectic pace, but persists in offering work of uneven quality.Credit Illustration by Victor Melamed

Valery Gergiev, the longtime artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre, in St. Petersburg, has attained a level of worldly power perhaps unmatched by any living classical musician. The Russian edition of Forbes has placed him at No. 3 on a list of the wealthiest and most popular Russian celebrities, behind the tennis player Maria Sharapova and the singer-songwriter Grigory Leps. Gergiev’s annual income is said to be $16.5 million. He was recently given the title of Hero of Labor by President Vladimir Putin, who has been on friendly terms with the conductor since 1992, when Putin was a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Last spring, Gergiev presided over the opening of a seven-hundred-million-dollar addition to the Mariinsky complex. Putin was in attendance, and offered a birthday toast to Gergiev, who had just turned sixty. Bigger plans may be afoot: there is talk of a grand merger of cultural organizations under Gergiev’s aegis.

Gergiev is a prominent supporter of the current Russian regime. Last year, in a television ad for Putin’s third Presidential campaign, he said, “One needs to be able to hold oneself presidentially, so that people reckon with the country. I don’t know if it’s fear? Respect? Reckoning.” Asked to comment on the Pussy Riot case, Gergiev suggested that the young women in the band were merely out to make money. (One member has been on a hunger strike in a prison camp.) Such positions have had international consequences. The recent passage in Russia of legislation barring gay “propaganda” led to demonstrations against Gergiev when he came to New York this fall: Queer Nation members staged a protest at the opening night of “Eugene Onegin” at the Met, which Gergiev conducted, and again at the first of three concerts that he presented with the Mariinsky Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. In subsequent interviews, Gergiev stated that his theatre has never discriminated against anyone. He also claimed that the Carnegie protest had been more “aggressive” than the one at the Met, because there were no Americans onstage. To my ears, the second protest was briefer and milder.

Gergiev has not always been so invested in politics. When I wrote a profile of him for this magazine, in 1998, he told me, “You never know what kind of Communists or Socialists or President or military dictator will come along. You’d better just do what you can do tomorrow rather than think ahead seven years.” At that time, he was concerned mainly with keeping the Mariinsky afloat, wheedling money from donors around the world. The Mariinsky remains the center of Gergiev’s existence, and his gestures on behalf of Putin may be less a statement of ideological solidarity than an expression of gratitude for the leader’s financial largesse. Gergiev still insists that the music alone matters. When a Russian paper asked him about the gay issue, he said, “As a director of the theatre, I have only one criterion: ability, talent.”

It appears that Gergiev wants to have it both ways: he dabbles in politics, yet insists that politics stops at the doors of art. This is an old illusion. Richard Strauss used similar language in a 1935 letter to Stefan Zweig: “For me, there are only two categories of people: those who have talent, and those who have none.” Strauss was saying that Nazi anti-Semitism had no bearing on his artistic standards, despite his position in the regime. Of course, the propaganda law in Russia, obnoxious as it is, hardly rises to the level of Nazi repression. But the legislation is disturbingly retrogressive, and has fed a wave of anti-gay violence. No one should be surprised that gay people, for whom concert halls and opera houses have long been safe havens, are turning away from Gergiev and other pro-Putin musicians. In this case, fear is not the same thing as respect.

Fifteen years ago, Gergiev’s friends and colleagues were worrying about whether he could maintain a frantic schedule without injuring his health. At sixty, he appears inexhaustible. In the 2012-13 season, he conducted no fewer than two hundred and sixty-one times: with the Mariinsky, at home and on tour; with the London Symphony, of which he has been the principal conductor since 2007; and with other orchestras and opera houses, including the Met. While Gergiev seems to thrive on this hectic pace, he persists in offering work of uneven quality, not least because his schedule rarely permits adequate rehearsal. Since 2009, the Mariinsky has been issuing recordings on an in-house label: a “Ring” cycle is under way, and although starry singers have been assembled for the occasion—Nina Stemme, René Pape, Jonas Kaufmann—the performances so far have lurched between visceral excitement and affectless note-spinning. With the London Symphony, Gergiev has released a brilliantly played but interpretively undistinguished Mahler cycle. This indiscriminate spewing of product is especially baffling given the immense resources at Gergiev’s command.

In his recent trio of concerts at Carnegie, Gergiev confined himself to Russian repertory. First, there was a marathon program of the three great early ballets of Stravinsky: “The Firebird,” “Petrushka,” and “The Rite of Spring.” Then came the First Piano Concerto and the Eighth Symphony of Shostakovich, with the steely young virtuoso Denis Matsuev as the soloist. Finally, Gergiev presented Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances” and Third Piano Concerto, the latter again with Matsuev. Notwithstanding the political controversy, the audience responded with full-throated enthusiasm. Matsuev, having rushed and banged his way through the concertos, gave a flurry of encores, including a bizarre virtuoso fantasy on “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

The Mariinsky shows more technical polish than it did a decade ago; many youngsters appear in its ranks, and they are playing at a generally high level, some awkward brass moments aside. Yet, despite the characteristic Gergiev effects (wine-dark sonorities in the cellos and the basses, precisely calibrated explosions of percussion), the orchestra sounds more anonymous, more routine, than in past years. The folklike melodies of the Princesses’ Khorovod, in “The Firebird,” lacked the distinctive vocal shape that one would expect from a Russian ensemble. The musicians weren’t helped by Gergiev’s tendency to choose lugubrious tempos: at several points in “The Firebird,” he seemed to be trying to interpolate a Mahlerian adagio, to stultifying effect. The coda was bloated and inert. A similar deliberateness marred the “Danse Sacrale” of the “Rite,” which otherwise moved at a bruising clip.

The Rachmaninoff program had the virtue of avoiding late-Romantic sentimentality. Gergiev caught the grim mood of the “Symphonic Dances,” the composer’s valedictory statement; the final movement, with its allusions to the Dies Irae, was propulsive, even brutal. Yet there was a deficit of singing warmth, and an almost total absence of charm. The one fully worked-out interpretation was that of the Shostakovich Eighth, a sweat-inducing juggernaut that has long been a Gergiev signature. The hammering climaxes hit home; so, too, did those episodes of frozen lyricism which suggest a solitary figure wandering across the tundra.

At the same time, this was the performance that left me with the greatest psychological unease—a kind of critical despair. We have read many accounts of Shostakovich’s life under Stalin, his terror-stricken accommodations with the Soviet state. How should we react when this composer’s music is led by a conductor who has entered his own pact with authority, who has even spoken approvingly of the politics of fear? There is no clear answer to that question. We have all made our compromises with power; everywhere, the noblest artistic strivings are circumscribed by social conditions that make them look hypocritical and hollow. But the historical ironies surrounding Valery Gergiev are becoming uncomfortably intense. ♦

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